About “Mending Wall”

“Mending Wall” is the opening poem of Frost’s second collection, North of Boston (1914). The poem appeared on the eve of World War I, and despite its peaceful rural setting is often interpreted as an allegory about geographical borders, ideological boundaries, and other metaphorical walls between nations and individuals.

When President John F. Kennedy inspected the Berlin Wall he quoted the poem’s first line: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” His audience knew what he meant….And on the other side of that particular wall, we can find another example of how the poem has been used. Returning from a visit to Russia late in his life, Frost said, “The Russians reprinted ‘Mending Wall’ over there, and left that first line off.” He added wryly, “I don’t see how they got the poem started.” What the Russians needed, and so took, was the poem’s other detachable statement: “Good fences make good neighbors.” They applied what they wanted. “I could’ve done better for them, probably,” Frost said, “for the generality, by saying:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
Something there is that does.

The poem helped popularize the folk saying “Good fences make good neighbors,” which in context is anything but straightforward. The speaker frames it in a subtly ironic context, as the wisdom of an older and possibly narrow-minded generation, and questions it throughout the second half of his monologue. How we interpret the poem depends largely on how we read its applicability both to the speaker-neighbor relationship and to the wider world.